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Outlines and Blogs

I’ve been thinking of how Outlines and Blogs can inetgrate together — on both a personal level, and within enterprises. This is part of what we call internally the “Digital Dashboard” project. (I am still trying to evolve this analogy, so this is perhaps not as nicely drafted as it should be, but I’ll talk about it anyways.)

Blogs, as has been well documented, are like personal diaries. So, they are akin to the notebook in which I make my daily notes — about meetings, ideas, etc. So, the notebook is a chronological assimilation of my daily life. But what it does not capture is the big picture — the framework in which various events take place. This is where the Outlines come in.

Outlines are like Maps, or a Table of Contents. They provide the overview, the higher-level view of the landscape. The view is at a point of time and keeps evolving. So, for the various things we are working on, we can have Outlines which give an evolved view of our thinking. From the Outlines, the links go into weblogs for the details. The weblogs give the latest picture, what’s happening today, but via the outlines one can also navigate to older thinking on different topics. It helps one see how thinking has evolved over time.

Thus, Outlines and Blogs taken together to create a new read-think-write environment. One needs both the “directory” (the outline) as well as the “details” (the blog).